Glad To Be Alive

 Glad To Be Alive

By what is known as a strange coincidence, I met someone who had an excellent reason to thank Canadians for his life.

In the late summer, I and my family were just driving away from a short camping trip in the terraced mountains above Ibb, in the green highlands of Yemen, when on the dirt track ahead of us we saw a man in an old army-green jacket. He waved for a ride and we fitted him in the car. Soon we were chatting. I told him that I'm British but that my wife's from Canada, and his eyes lit up.

'Ah, Canada! I love Canada!' he exclaimed. The vehemence of his response surprised us.

I lived in the Middle East for some years, and enjoyed lively conversations with those most social and hospitable people, the Arabs. Very often if I mentioned that I had married a Canadian, the response would be a grin and the words, 'Ah! Canada Dry!' since (to their loss) most people didn't know much else about Canada. But this was a startling response from a man whom I'd taken as an ordinary villager. As he revealed, he'd been through a close and prolonged brush with death.

Have you ever had that feeling? It gives you the most awful wrench to find yourself dangling over the precipice, on a one-way ticket out of this world. More than once I almost fell down a Middle Eastern mountainside or imagined the sharks of the Red Sea closing in on me. A narrow escape makes you glad that you're alive and eager to make the most of what's left.

Yemen is a country much in the news, and rarely for happy reasons. But we have much in common with the people of that land, despite the fact that one of the overriding themes of life for most Yemenis is poverty, so systematic that it's hard for them to feel glad to wake up in the mornings. Nevertheless, many of them still manage to shine.

I asked the man why he loved Canada, and this was his tale, supplemented by news reports from sources such as Reuters and the Canadian Forces online newssheet The Maple Leaf[1].

A couple of years before, Ahmed was a private in the army of Yemen, posted on a small, remote island in the Red Sea, named Jebel Al Tair, 'Bird Mountain'. At about 5.30pm on the last day of September, 2007, the island blew its top. It must have been a horrifying shock to the roughly 30-strong garrison whose working routine had consisted, until that moment, of keeping watch on shipping in the busy Suez-Indian Ocean route.

All credit to the Yemeni armed forces on the island: they evacuated as many of the garrison as they could as the western side of the island collapsed, lava fountained into the sky and the ash plumed above that, but still, eight or ten men were unaccounted for at the end of that traumatic day.

One of those missing was twenty-two year old Private Ahmed from the lush, mountainous province of Ibb. Perhaps they were stationed on the far side of the island. When they realised they were cut off from the rescue boats he and his several comrades-in-arms were forced by the advancing lava further and further towards the sea. The ground beneath their feet shook and the furious magma forcing its way up to the surface emitted strange bubbling sounds. He made it into the waves. Soon he was separated from his friends by swells and currents.

Initially, he began to swim away from the island as fast as he could manage. He shed his heavy army-issue clothes. Even if he didn't drown, how long could he survive the threats of exposure, dehydration and shark attack? Night came on quickly, but the island was alight in frenetic flame, lighting up the sky. The lava shot more than a hundred metres into the air, fell back and ran down the slopes of the island. The waters would not have been freezing, merely cold as the day's heat fled into the night sky. All that night he floated and spluttered, no doubt earnestly praying for rescue. Most Yemenis have a strong basic faith in God, one that goes hand in hand with a fatalism that ascribes all events, whether good or bad, to God's will.

The sea currents drew him away from the island. Later he would have seen lights on the water, distant, not far from the glowing island, but at least a sign of human activity. He tried to make for the lights, but the currents had other plans for him. He clung to life through the night and when dawn crept up on him he was alone in the sea, miles from the island. There were no rescue ships to be seen anywhere. They had left him for dead. He could keep crying out to God, but perhaps God had decreed that he drown.

The sun rose, the day went on, and Ahmed somehow kept kicking and splashing, one contested breath after another. The sun burned him from overhead and traversed the sky. Finally he thought he was in delirium, seeing the shape of a large ship in the distance. With the last of his strength, he raised a hand over his head.

What he didn't know was that the Yemeni authorities had contacted a NATO fleet of six ships that just happened to be passing through the area at the time of the volcano's eruption. They were heading north towards the Suez Canal. HMCS Toronto was the Canadian contribution to that fleet. Within a few hours of the eruption the fleet had approached the island of Jebel Al-Tair and conducted a search operation at night using small boats and spotlights, hoping to pick up survivors. When they found none and the night had passed, the Yemeni authorities called off the search and the fleet began to resume its northward course.

What happened next is astonishing. Picture the huge expanse of the sea, and the thin line traced through it by those ships. The NATO fleet was no longer searching, but by a very happy coincidence one of the ships discovered a survivor in the water. All six ships began searching again despite the scorching sun and the glare it cast on the sea.

LS Valerie Martin was standing sentry on the deck of the Toronto, enduring that extreme heat. The Toronto was at that point about ten kilometres from the two-kilometre-long island. Sharp-eyed, she suddenly saw a speck of movement some way from the ship – a tiny hand lifted above the surface, hundreds of metres away. Soon Toronto's  Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat was speeding across the water towards Private Ahmed. Leading Seaman Frank Stewart reached down and took hold of Pte Ahmed's arm and pulled him aboard. According to the Maple Leaf account written by Ken Allen:

“My heart dropped when I saw him,” says LS Stewart. “We just pulled him into the RHIB and he looked exhausted. ... and he grabbed my arm and just kind of nodded. I  don't speak his language but I knew he was grateful. That's what we train to do. I think that that one moment made my career.”

So Ahmed survived, but barely. He had endured about twenty hours in the open sea, exhausted, extremely thirsty, and hungry. His eyes were red and sore from the salt water. I like Ken Allen's description: 'He had the bewildered look of a man who could not believe what had just occurred.' After his recovery, Pte Ahmed was able to call his family and tell them he was alright, and members of the Yemeni coastguard took him back to the mainland. He was wearing a HMCS Toronto ball cap and waving goodbye to his rescuers.

This isn't a story to show how we helped them. I was helped numerous times while living in Yemen. It's a story, though, that helps to link us together with some people far away. They have a lot of the same hopes and disappointments, they tell jokes, they cry, they laugh, they cling to life with tenacity. Here's one last thing we have in common with the people of Yemen: a bad press. Just a little while before the time of writing, Canada got a big black mark, namely the clouds of burning car smoke rising from downtown Vancouver, rising from the ashes of our 2011 Stanley Cup hopes. A dream went sour and the media was there to catch some people's frustrations being worked out. But would you or I burn a car or smash a store window? Hope not.

It's not so different from the reaction of the huge majority of Yemeni people when there's mention of Al Qaida: they disown those violent extremists and earnestly reframe their religion as one of peace. (Hmmm... Could we say the same about hockey, since it appears to be Canada's national religion?) Whether the Yemenis are right or wrong to claim that, the Yemen I knew was a peaceful enough place, and I can only recall being threatened with a gun on one occasion. And I can still hear Private Ahmed's gratitude to the Canadian servicemen and women who saved him that day. He was happy to be alive.

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[1] The Maple Leaf : HMCS Toronto rescues Yemen soldier after volcano erupts

http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/commun/ml-fe/article-eng.asp?id=3825